July | 2009 | Nerd Fortress

Archive for July, 2009

July Software Pick: Archon for iPhone and Linux

Posted in Indie Games, Software Picks on July 23, 2009 | 2 Comments »

Years ago I used to go with my family to my cousin’s house in Arizona each year for Christmas, and they had about every type of home computer system and peripheral you could think of. We would spend hours upon hours playing games on these systems, and one of my favorites was Archon: The Light and the Dark for Commodore 64. What an absolutely fantastic game!

And now, after all these years, we are finally getting a chance to play it again. And on the iPhone, no less! React Games is making it all possible.

Get Archon Classic now from the App Store or Beta Test Version 1.2

If you would like a feel for the original gameplay and you have access to a Linux box (or Mac running X11), try out XArchon, a free version of Archon for *nix systems.

Now, I just hope they make a port for the Wii…

Indie game developers take note: there is a huge business opportunity in reinventing old, almost-forgotten classics.

Read Full Post »

Windows Vista Sleep Fix: How to Put Vista Laptops and Desktops to Sleep

Posted in How To on July 21, 2009 | 2 Comments »

In my own experience, Windows Vista’s power settings are often wrong by default when it comes to sleep settings. Lenovo laptops in particular seem to have serious issues in this regard. If you are having trouble getting your Vista (or Windows 7) laptop or desktop to go to sleep, here is how to fix it.

The first thing to try is the multimedia “when sharing media” power option:

1. Open Power Settings, choose the plan you have selected
2. Click change plan settings
3. Click change advanced power setting
4. Go to Multimedia settings >> When sharing media and change the setting to Allow the computer to sleep

If that doesn’t fix the problem (it worked for me), try this as well:

5. Go to USB settings >> USB selective suspend and set it to Enabled

And finally, if you are still having trouble, check to ensure all your drivers are up to date, and check for a new version of your BIOS from your manufacturer’s support website. Some device drivers have bugs that prevent your system from sleeping. Also, you may wish to check your anti-virus software (if you are unfortunate enough to have some installed), and any backup programs you use to see if they are scheduled to do work when your computer should be sleeping.

Read Full Post »

Hard Disk Drives are Holding You Back

Posted in Random Stuff on July 15, 2009 | 2 Comments »

The next great leap ahead in computer performance won’t come from multi-core CPUs, despite all the media hype to the contrary. The biggest bottleneck in your computer RIGHT NOW is that big, fat, lazy hard disk drive. It is the ONLY part of your system (besides cooling, of course) that still uses that most ancient of technologies, Moving Parts. The situation is so bad, in fact, that software engineers go to great lengths to avoid EVER reading from the hard drive. Gustavo Duarte makes a good point:

The latency to a fast website (say, google.com) is about 45ms, comparable to hard drive seek latency. In fact, while hard drives are 5 orders of magnitude removed from main memory, they’re in the same magnitude as the Internet. Residential bandwidth still lags behind that of sustained hard drive reads, but the ‘network is the computer’ in a pretty literal sense now. What happens when the Internet is faster than a hard drive?

In other words, we need to get past this bottleneck, or Moore’s Law is going to quickly become meaningless. Here is a short summary of hard disk drive replacements that actually have a chance at making it to your desktop in the near future:

Solid-State Drives (SSD) are fast (250 MB/s), expensive, very efficient (0.15 Watts), and you can buy one today. Linus says that Intel SSDs are the only ones to buy.

Hard Rectangular Drives (HRD) are crazy fast (500 MB/s) but expensive. Their first target is high-end database servers.

Metal Foil Drives (MFD) are fast (~250 MB/s), cheap, extremely reliable, and efficient. MFD’s are not yet available, but the technology is patented and Cringely is working on it.

Update: Intel recently announced cheaper, faster SSDs.

Read Full Post »

Play Super Mario War (SMW) on the Wii

Posted in Indie Games on July 15, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

Good news for SMW fans! Due to the efforts of several diligent game hackers, including our own dotbatman, Super Mario War has finally been ported to the Wii! For now you have to play this on the Homebrew channel, but the good news is that setting up the Homebrew channel is easier than ever before, since you no longer have to use the Wii Twilight Hack.

It would be great to see an officially blessed version of Super Mario War make its way to WiiWare. I’m off to go shopping for an SD card so I can try this out for myself.

Read Full Post »